Daniel Zamudio’s death in March 2012 sparked outrage across Chile and prompted lawmakers to pass a hate crimes and anti-discrimination bill. (Photos courtesy of Fundación Daniel Zamudio.)

A Chilean court on Monday sentenced four men convicted of beating a beating a gay man to death in the country’s capital last year.

The newspaper El Mercurio reported that Patricio Ahumada Garay, who prosecutors say masterminded the attack against Daniel Zamudio in a Santiago park on March 3, 2012, received a life sentence. The court also sentenced Raúl López Fuentes and Alejandro Angulo Tapia to 15 years in prison.

Fabián Mora Mora received a seven year sentence.

Prosecutors contend the four men who described themselves as neo-Nazis attacked Zamudio because he was gay. They said Ahumada, López, Angulo and Mora struck him with bottles and other blunt objects before they cut off part of his ear, carved swastikas into his chest and burned other body parts with cigarettes.

Zamudio died in a Santiago hospital nearly a month after the attack.

The crime sparked widespread outrage across Chile.

President Sebastián Piñera in July 2012 signed a hate crimes and anti-discrimination bill that includes both sexual orientation and gender identity and expression that had languished in the South American country’s Congress for seven years. Jaime Parada Hoyl, a Chilean LGBT rights advocate who last November became the first openly gay political candidate elected in the South American country, told the Washington Blade during an interview in D.C. last fall that Zamudio’s death was a “point of inflection” for Chile and its lawmakers.

Anti-LGBT violence remains a concern for Chilean advocates

The Movement for Homosexual Integration and Liberation (Movilh,) a Chilean LGBT advocacy group, last week expressed outrage over what it described as an anti-gay attack against 21-year-old Wladimir Sepúlveda near the city of Rancagua that left him in a coma.

Doctors in June amputated Esteban Navarro Quinchevil’s leg after a group of six men attacked him on a soccer field in a Santiago suburb because he is gay. A transgender teenager from the coastal city of Cartagena lost an eye in May during what Movilh maintains was an anti-trans attack.